A common practice when operating a well is the use of casing in a wellbore. Casing is pipe lowered into a borehole, which is typically cemented in place. Casing joints are often fabricated with male and female threads on each end that allow the individual joints of casing to be joined together. A well designer may design casing to withstand a variety of forces, such as collapse, burst, and tensile failure, as well as chemically aggressive brines. Casing is utilized for a variety of reason, such as protecting fresh water formations, isolating a zone of lost returns, isolating formations with significantly different pressure gradients, preventing unstable upper formations from caving-in and sticking the drill string or forming large caverns, providing a strong upper foundation to use high-density drilling fluid to continue drilling deeper, isolating different zones, sealing off high pressure zones from the surface, avoiding potential for a blowout, and the like.
After a well is drilled and metal casing is placed, cement is pumped to the well to fill the spacing between the casing and the formation. Cement provides mechanical support for the casing and keeps different formation layers isolated. This is a very important step, which prevents various fluid types (e.g. water and oil) in the reservoir to be mixed with each-other. The isolation between various formation layers is a critical aspect of well integrity tests to ensure hydrocarbon production in a safe manner. Cement evaluation measurements may be routinely done to check the bonding between the cement and the metal casing. In some techniques, a transmitter inside the well transmits sonic or ultrasonic waves to the internal wall of the casing. The waves or signal travels through the casing wall and gets reflected from the casing-cement boundary. By analyzing the phase and amplitude of the reflected signals, the bonding quality between the casing and the cement can be determined. However, this technique is limited to providing information on the bonding quality, and does not provide any information about the cement itself such as its thickness or the level of setting (e.g. the level of solidness). Thus, there is a need for systems and methods that utilize integrated chips that emit and/or detect electromagnetic waves that allow surrounding materials to be analyzed.